Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys was a writer born in Roseau, Dominica, on 24 August 1890, and is usually described as a British novelist. She grew up in the Caribbean in a family of mixed Welsh and Creole background, then moved to England as a teenager. Life there was often hard, and she lived for long periods in London and Paris, working in small jobs and moving through uncertain relationships.

Her early novels and stories of the 1920s and 1930s follow lonely, vulnerable women on the edge of society, written in a spare, precise and musical style. She then dropped almost out of public view for many years. Her reputation revived with Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, a novel that imagines the life of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre. It brought her wide acclaim and lasting influence on writing about exile, colonial history and women's inner lives. She died on 14 May 1979.